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Comment by jmcannon | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN - a little background, which might be interesting to some. I went through YC twice, the second time with a company called EveryArt. After working on that for two years as a solo founder, I decided to close it down. I moved from San Francisco to Istanbul and started a niche business (actually, just renamed EveryArt, Inc. in fairness to investors) that has done well enough to support me. I started teaching myself objective C in January to eventually build CleverDeck, which was motivated out of dissatisfaction with the available spaced repetition apps available (Anki, Memrise, etc.) I'll be hanging around if you have any questions. Thanks!

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What especially were you dissatisfied with using Anki and Memrise? And how do CleverDeck do them better?

There's a lot to talk about, much of which I wrote about in detail here: http://cleverdeck.com/blog

But to name the big two:

1. I just wanted something I could pull out of my pocket and tell me what to learn. Of course I want to be able to customize it (and you can in CleverDeck), but I found myself spending so much time in the others creating and managing different lists. With CleverDeck, the app is the list. If I don't have time to add words that I'm encountering in the wild, then the app will pull from a default ordering that's sorted by "usefulness."

2. I didn't really like the user experience of others. Too many confidence levels led to cognitive fatigue; I had to tap through menus to find which lists had which number of cards I needed to review. With this, just open it and swipe. It just tells me when cards come up for me to review, and automatically presents 10 new cards the next day (or whatever I have the setting adjusted to).

It seems like a slicker UI specifically for language learning, as well as "curated" decks for each language.

I doubt anyone can replicate everything that Anki can do, but there's probably some gains to be had by cutting out complexity.

I use Anki for everything except language learning. It helps me remember books I've read, people, certain numbers, facts, etc. I am really grateful for a lot of the complex features Anki has.

My main beef with Anki is the developer's unwillingness to open up the API. Card creation is currently a pretty unpleasant experience, but I can't currently build a browser extension without doing a lot of hacky bullshit because the the developer won't expose any public endpoints.

AnkiMobile developer here. Are you referring to the mobile app or the desktop app? Because the desktop has API endpoints you can hook into with extensions [0]. If you're talking about the mobile app, I believe we originally decided not to provide an extension API because Apple forbids it.

[0]: http://ankisrs.net/docs/addons.html

I am talking about a REST API that hooks into your AnkiWeb infrastructure. I believe I asked about this in one of the google groups and was told you aren't interested in doing that because of the additional load it could put on the service. I would love to put together something like the Evernote webclipper for creating cards right here in the browser without doing this awkward alt+tab+click+click+click+etc dance to create cards on the desktop client. I admire the work you and others have done on Anki and its extensions, but if I'm going to use Anki as my primary learning tool it needs to be delightful and effortless to create/delete cards as needed.

Ah OK, in that case I can see both sides. From Damien's perspective, AnkiWeb is a free service, so development/support time and server load have to be considered for any new feature. From the user perspective, web clipping tools would be really nice.

Is there anything to prevent interacting between the desktop app API and a web clipping browser plugin, in the same way that the Zotero connector plugin does with the Zotero app API for example?